A special independent prosecutor should be appointed to probe Hillary Clinton's mushrooming email scandal — because it's questionable whether the Justice Department can be impartial, Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog Judicial Watch, tells Newsmax TV.

"This is a matter of some potential criminal consequence and there has to be a serious independent investigation," Fitton said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."

"I don't understand why everyone in Washington seems to think that the Justice Department, under President [Barack] Obama and his appointee, Loretta Lynch, is independent enough to do this type of investigation.

"There needs to be a special counsel … [who] can reassure the public that things are going to be done on the up-and-up."

The Justice Department is probing whether classified information was illegally stored or passed through Clinton's private email server during her correspondences as secretary of state.

The server was turned over to the FBI on Wednesday after news broke that two classified emails found on it were "Top Secret." The New York Times reported the leading Democratic presidential candidate told aides to give the FBI the server along with a thumb drive containing copies of the emails.

Reports also surfaced that materials went through the server that had initially been marked top secret but then had those markings stripped off.

"It's taken too long for the server to be taken up by the FBI and the Justice Department as it is. They've known there's been classified information on there for some time or had reason to believe there was and yet did nothing to it," Fitton told Steve Malzberg.

"When you're talking about classified information residing on a secure system like this, Mrs. Clinton and the others have responsibility and they took efforts to delete classified markings in order to transmit them or keep them elsewhere."

A special independent prosecutor should be appointed to probe Hillary Clinton's mushrooming email scandal - because it's questionable whether the Justice Department can be impartial, Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog Judicial Watch, tells Newsmax TV.